SEO
6 Best WordPress Review Plugins For 2022
If you want to increase traffic to your WordPress site, boost your SEO, or bring in more sales from your WooCommerce products, you will benefit from installing a WordPress review plugin on your website.
By having reviews for your services or products and increasing social proof, you’re more likely to draw new customers to your business and retain existing ones.
Reviews are one of the most powerful sources of marketing and the best part is, they’re also free!
Collecting reviews from your customers and clients is also a great source of feedback.
This will allow you to make changes and improvements to your products and customer experience as well as form a relationship with your customers.
Not only does this increase the chance that they will become a repeat customer but they will also be more willing to recommend you and your services or products to others.
Choosing A WordPress Review Plugin
As with choosing any plugin, you want to make sure the review plugin you install on your WordPress site is going to be reliable and safe.
Before installing a review plugin, first, make sure that it has good reviews and ratings.
When browsing plugins, you will see a star rating and in brackets will be the number of reviews.
The higher the star rating and the number of reviews, the better.
You also want to check how many active installations the plugin has.
Again, the higher the number of active installations, the better, as this means that more people are using the plugin on their website.
And lastly, make sure the plugin has been tested with the latest version of WordPress.
Here are my top six WordPress plugin recommendations. These will provide an attractive and easy-to-use review process for your website.
All of the listed review plugins have been tested with WordPress 6.0 and have excellent ratings among over 20,000 users.
1. WP Review Pro
If you are looking for a truly comprehensive review plugin, you cannot go wrong with WP Review Pro.
WP Review Free includes all of the basic features, but it is well worth the $67 to upgrade to the pro version for unlimited sites to unlock the full feature set.
With WP Review Pro, you get unlimited color selections, and a variety of rating options, such as stars, percentages, thumbs up/down, points, or a circle rating.
The plugin supports 19 rich snippets and works seamlessly with Facebook, Google, and Yelp reviews in order to extend your reach.
Highly customizable pre-defined designs make it easy to match your branding or other popular review platforms.
2. Site Reviews
Site Reviews is a simple review plugin that allows users to leave a review through a customized form.
Reviews use a 1 to 5-star system and are filterable.
You can also pin favorable reviews to the top so that they are the first reviews that customers see.
Site Reviews can also be used with WooCommerce via a free add-on to replace the WooCommerce Reviews with Site Reviews for the products in your WooCommerce store.
The plugin can be used as a shortcode, custom Gutenberg block, or widget and it supports native Elementor widgets to accommodate various theme and builder types and is free.
3. Plugin For Google Reviews
Plugin for Google Reviews specifically displays ratings and reviews from Google, using a public Google API.
The free version will limit you to displaying five Google reviews while the Business version, which runs $85/year for a single site, uses an API for your Google Business account, allowing unlimited Google Reviews.
The upgrade will also give you unlimited Yelp and Facebook reviews and will sync your accounts for automatic updates.
You can also mix and match reviews and customers can leave a review through your website for the other platforms.
Want to put your best reviews at the top?
Use the filter feature to display reviews in the order you want.
Five themes are available and reviews can be displayed using a widget, shortcode, or Universal HTML/JavaScript.
4. Customer Reviews For WooCommerce
The Customer Reviews for WooCommerce plugin allows customers who have shopped in your store to leave written reviews and photos to increase your social proof and bring in more customers.
You can have an email automatically sent when a customer makes a purchase asking them to leave a review. You can even send coupons to those that do leave a review.
The plugin also integrates with a service to verify the authenticity of reviews.
Customer Reviews for WooCommerce uses ratings and voting review types, as well as customer-submitted photos. Reviews can also be filtered.
There is a free Basic version but for more customization and professional features, you will want to consider the Professional version for $49.99/year.
5. Starfish Reviews
The Starfish Reviews plugin uses a funnel system to sort positive and negative reviews.
The plugin is set up in the WordPress dashboard and can link to Google, Yelp, Facebook, and a number of other third-party review platforms.
In the first step of the review, a positive or negative review choice is shown.
If the positive review is chosen, you give the customer single or multiple options of where they can leave their review.
If a negative review is chosen, the feedback will be sent back to you and they can be prompted for more information.
Depending on the restrictions of the review platform(s) you are using, you can choose not to allow them to post a negative review or allow it.
A very limited version of the plugin is available for free on wordpress.org and Starfish Reviews also has multiple paid tiers starting at $37 per month.
6. Taqyeem
The Taqyeem WordPress Review Plugin creates beautiful custom reviews that can be added to pages, posts, and custom post types.
You have unlimited color and review criteria customizations with a choice of over 500 Google Fonts to match a variety of branding.
Rating styles are points, percentages, and stars and multiple options are available for the rating image. Reviews can be displayed by Best, Recent, and Random.
The Taqyeem plugin uses Google Rich Snippets for optimal viewing through search engines.
The plugin has a one-time purchase price of $29 through CodeCanyon, which includes six months of support. Additional support can be purchased.
Choosing The Best WordPress Review Plugin In 2022
With over 1,000 WordPress review plugins available to choose from, it can be hard to know where to begin.
When choosing any plugin for your WordPress site, be mindful of the star rating, reviews, active installations, and compatibility with the latest version of WordPress.
There are plenty of free review plugins for WordPress that are reputable and reliable, but paid review plugins may offer the additional features that you require.
Displaying reviews from customers and clients on your website is great for marketing and establishing trust with your audience so it’s worth taking the time to choose a review plugin that is going to work seamlessly on your WordPress website.
Featured Image: Jirsak/Shutterstock
SEO
HARO Has Been Dead for a While
I know nothing about the new tool. I haven’t tried it. But after trying to use HARO recently, I can’t say I’m surprised or saddened by its death. It’s been a walking corpse for a while.
I used HARO way back in the day to build links. It worked. But a couple of months ago, I experienced the platform from the other side when I decided to try to source some “expert” insights for our posts.
After just a few minutes of work, I got hundreds of pitches:
So, I grabbed a cup of coffee and began to work through them. It didn’t take long before I lost the will to live. Every other pitch seemed like nothing more than lazy AI-generated nonsense from someone who definitely wasn’t an expert.
Here’s one of them:
Seriously. Who writes like that? I’m a self-confessed dullard (any fellow Dull Men’s Club members here?), and even I’m not that dull…
I don’t think I looked through more than 30-40 of the responses. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt like having a conversation with ChatGPT… and not a very good one!
Despite only reviewing a few dozen of the many pitches I received, one stood out to me:
Believe it or not, this response came from a past client of mine who runs an SEO agency in the UK. Given how knowledgeable and experienced he is (he actually taught me a lot about SEO back in the day when I used to hassle him with questions on Skype), this pitch rang alarm bells for two reasons:
- I truly doubt he spends his time replying to HARO queries
- I know for a fact he’s no fan of Neil Patel (sorry, Neil, but I’m sure you’re aware of your reputation at this point!)
So… I decided to confront him 😉
Here’s what he said:
Shocker.
I pressed him for more details:
I’m getting a really good deal and paying per link rather than the typical £xxxx per month for X number of pitches. […] The responses as you’ve seen are not ideal but that’s a risk I’m prepared to take as realistically I dont have the time to do it myself. He’s not native english, but I have had to have a word with him a few times about clearly using AI. On the low cost ones I don’t care but on authority sites it needs to be more refined.
I think this pretty much sums up the state of HARO before its death. Most “pitches” were just AI answers from SEOs trying to build links for their clients.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not throwing shade here. I know that good links are hard to come by, so you have to do what works. And the reality is that HARO did work. Just look at the example below. You can tell from the anchor and surrounding text in Ahrefs that these links were almost certainly built with HARO:
But this was the problem. HARO worked so well back in the day that it was only a matter of time before spammers and the #scale crew ruined it for everyone. That’s what happened, and now HARO is no more. So…
If you’re a link builder, I think it’s time to admit that HARO link building is dead and move on.
No tactic works well forever. It’s the law of sh**ty clickthroughs. This is why you don’t see SEOs having huge success with tactics like broken link building anymore. They’ve moved on to more innovative tactics or, dare I say it, are just buying links.
Sidenote.
Talking of buying links, here’s something to ponder: if Connectively charges for pitches, are links built through those pitches technically paid? If so, do they violate Google’s spam policies? It’s a murky old world this SEO lark, eh?
If you’re a journalist, Connectively might be worth a shot. But with experts being charged for pitches, you probably won’t get as many responses. That might be a good thing. You might get less spam. Or you might just get spammed by SEOs with deep pockets. The jury’s out for now.
My advice? Look for alternative methods like finding and reaching out to experts directly. You can easily use tools like Content Explorer to find folks who’ve written lots of content about the topic and are likely to be experts.
For example, if you look for content with “backlinks” in the title and go to the Authors tab, you might see a familiar name. 😉
I don’t know if I’d call myself an expert, but I’d be happy to give you a quote if you reached out on social media or emailed me (here’s how to find my email address).
Alternatively, you can bait your audience into giving you their insights on social media. I did this recently with a poll on X and included many of the responses in my guide to toxic backlinks.
Either of these options is quicker than using HARO because you don’t have to sift through hundreds of responses looking for a needle in a haystack. If you disagree with me and still love HARO, feel free to tell me why on X 😉
SEO
Google Clarifies Vacation Rental Structured Data
Google’s structured data documentation for vacation rentals was recently updated to require more specific data in a change that is more of a clarification than it is a change in requirements. This change was made without any formal announcement or notation in the developer pages changelog.
Vacation Rentals Structured Data
These specific structured data types makes vacation rental information eligible for rich results that are specific to these kinds of rentals. However it’s not available to all websites. Vacation rental owners are required to be connected to a Google Technical Account Manager and have access to the Google Hotel Center platform.
VacationRental Structured Data Type Definitions
The primary changes were made to the structured data property type definitions where Google defines what the required and recommended property types are.
The changes to the documentation is in the section governing the Recommended properties and represents a clarification of the recommendations rather than a change in what Google requires.
The primary changes were made to the structured data type definitions where Google defines what the required and recommended property types are.
The changes to the documentation is in the section governing the Recommended properties and represents a clarification of the recommendations rather than a change in what Google requires.
Address Schema.org property
This is a subtle change but it’s important because it now represents a recommendation that requires more precise data.
This is what was recommended before:
“streetAddress”: “1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy.”
This is what it now recommends:
“streetAddress”: “1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Unit 6E”
Address Property Change Description
The most substantial change is to the description of what the “address” property is, becoming more descriptive and precise about what is recommended.
The description before the change:
PostalAddress
Information about the street address of the listing. Include all properties that apply to your country.
The description after the change:
PostalAddress
The full, physical location of the vacation rental.
Provide the street address, city, state or region, and postal code for the vacation rental. If applicable, provide the unit or apartment number.
Note that P.O. boxes or other mailing-only addresses are not considered full, physical addresses.
This is repeated in the section for address.streetAddress property
This is what it recommended before:
address.streetAddress Text
The full street address of your vacation listing.
And this is what it recommends now:
address.streetAddress Text
The full street address of your vacation listing, including the unit or apartment number if applicable.
Clarification And Not A Change
Although these updates don’t represent a change in Google’s guidance they are nonetheless important because they offer clearer guidance with less ambiguity as to what is recommended.
Read the updated structured data guidance:
Vacation rental (VacationRental) structured data
Featured Image by Shutterstock/New Africa
SEO
Google On Hyphens In Domain Names
Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about why people don’t use hyphens with domains and if there was something to be concerned about that they were missing.
Domain Names With Hyphens For SEO
I’ve been working online for 25 years and I remember when using hyphens in domains was something that affiliates did for SEO when Google was still influenced by keywords in the domain, URL, and basically keywords anywhere on the webpage. It wasn’t something that everyone did, it was mainly something that was popular with some affiliate marketers.
Another reason for choosing domain names with keywords in them was that site visitors tended to convert at a higher rate because the keywords essentially prequalified the site visitor. I know from experience how useful two-keyword domains (and one word domain names) are for conversions, as long as they didn’t have hyphens in them.
A consideration that caused hyphenated domain names to fall out of favor is that they have an untrustworthy appearance and that can work against conversion rates because trustworthiness is an important factor for conversions.
Lastly, hyphenated domain names look tacky. Why go with tacky when a brandable domain is easier for building trust and conversions?
Domain Name Question Asked On Reddit
This is the question asked on Reddit:
“Why don’t people use a lot of domains with hyphens? Is there something concerning about it? I understand when you tell it out loud people make miss hyphen in search.”
And this is Mueller’s response:
“It used to be that domain names with a lot of hyphens were considered (by users? or by SEOs assuming users would? it’s been a while) to be less serious – since they could imply that you weren’t able to get the domain name with fewer hyphens. Nowadays there are a lot of top-level-domains so it’s less of a thing.
My main recommendation is to pick something for the long run (assuming that’s what you’re aiming for), and not to be overly keyword focused (because life is too short to box yourself into a corner – make good things, course-correct over time, don’t let a domain-name limit what you do online). The web is full of awkward, keyword-focused short-lived low-effort takes made for SEO — make something truly awesome that people will ask for by name. If that takes a hyphen in the name – go for it.”
Pick A Domain Name That Can Grow
Mueller is right about picking a domain name that won’t lock your site into one topic. When a site grows in popularity the natural growth path is to expand the range of topics the site coves. But that’s hard to do when the domain is locked into one rigid keyword phrase. That’s one of the downsides of picking a “Best + keyword + reviews” domain, too. Those domains can’t grow bigger and look tacky, too.
That’s why I’ve always recommended brandable domains that are memorable and encourage trust in some way.
Read the post on Reddit:
Read Mueller’s response here.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Benny Marty
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